Ilaiyaraaja

At 81 years old, Ilaiyaraaja has this physical status:

Ilaiyaraaja (born 2 June 1943) is an Indian film composer, singer, guitarist, orchestrator, conductor, and lyricist who works in Tamil cinema.

He is widely regarded as one of India's finest music composers and is credited with introducing western musical sensibilities.

He has written over 7000 songs, produced film scores for more than 1000 films, and appeared in over 20,000 concerts, being touted as the world's most popular composer.

Ilaiyaraaja is said to have written the entire symphony in less than a month being the first Asian to compose a complete symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London.

He is also a gold medalist in classical guitar from Trinity College of Music, London, Distance Learning Channel.

In a survey conducted by CNN-IBN naming Ilaiyaraaja as India's all-time best film-music director in 2013.

Early life

Ilaiyaraaja was born in 1953, in Gnanathesigan, a Dalit family, who lived in Pannaipuram, Tamil Nadu, India. He nevertheless celebrates his birthday on June in order not to interfere with the Karunanidhi's anniversary, which takes place on June 3rd. It was done out of respect for the late politician, who bestowed him the name "Isaignani."

When he began school, his father changed his name to "Rajaya," but his village people used to refer to him as "Raasayya." Ilaiyaraaja began learning musical instruments as a student, and the master renamed him simply "Raaja." Panchu Arunachalam, a Tamil film director, said "Ilaiya" (Ilaiya means younger in Tamil words) as a prefix in his name Raaja), and he named him "Ilaiyaraaja" in his first film Annakili because in the 1970s there was one more music director A. M. Rajah.

Ilaiyaraaja grew up in a rural area and was exposed to a variety of Tamil folk songs. He formed "Paval Brothers," a traveling musical troupe led by his elder brother Pavalar Varadharajan, at the age of 14, and spent the next decade in South India. He penned his first composition, a musical adaptation of an elegy written by Tamil poet laureate Kannadasan for Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, when working with the troupe. Ilaiyaraaja began a music course in Madras, which also included an overview of Western classical music, compositional study of techniques such as counterpoint, and an analysis of instrumental performance. After completing the course via distance learning channel from Trinity College of Music, London, Ilaiyaraaja is a gold medalist in classical guitar. He learned about carnatic music from T.V.Gopalakrishnan.

Personal life

Ilaiyaraaja was married to Jeeva, and the couple has three children, including Karthik Raja, Yuvan Shankar Raja, and Bhavatharini, all film composers and singers. Jeeva, his wife, died on October 31st. Gangai Amaran, Ilaiyaraja's brother, is also a music producer and lyricist, and they were not in agreement to speak for long teraiyaraaja.

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Career

Ilaiyaraaja played guitar in a band-for-hire and performed as a session guitarist, keyboardist, and organist for film music composers and producers such as Salil Chowdhury from West Bengal during the 1970s. Ilaiyaraaja will be India's best composer, according to Chowdhury once. He spent time in Kannada cinema after being recruited as the musical assistant to Kannada film composer G. K. Venkatesh. Ilaiyaraaja, G. K. Venkatesh's assistant, will orchestrate the musical diagrams outlined by Venkatesh. Ilaiyaraaja learned the most about writing under G. K. Venkatesh's direction. Ilaiyaraaja also began writing his own scores during this period. He used to convince Venkatesh's session players to perform excerpts from his compositions during their leisure hours to listen to his performances.

Ilaiyaraaja's music sensibility was very different from the film music being created in those days, so he spent a lot of time in learning, but "wasn't able to understand how music was being made for films." However, Panchu Arunachalam, a Tamil film producer who was inspired by a song casually sung by Ilaiyaraaja, hired him to write the songs and film score for a Tamil film named Annakili (The Parrot). Ilaiyaraaja's soundtrack combined modern popular film orchestration techniques with Tamil folk poetry and folk song melodies, resulting in the creation of a fusion of Western and Tamil idioms. He was initially worried about how his work would be received, and feared that musicians in the field might fire him off. The music became a big hit when Annakili first appeared in 1976. Ilaiyaraaja based his compositions on the contemporary film music of the time, and when a new wave of films came, it opened the door for the kind of music he wanted to explore.

Ilaiyaraaja's use of Tamil folk music in his film scores gave the Indian film score scene a new lease on life. Ilaiyaraaja's fame as a composer and music director in South India's film industries had grown by the mid-1980s. He has worked with Indian poets and lyricists like Kannadasan, Valiant, Vainamuthu, O. N. V. Kurup, Veturi, Aatreya, Chi, Sirivennela Sitara Sitara, India. Udaya Shankar and Gulzar were well-known for their collaboration with filmmakers including Bharathiraja, S. P. Muthuraman, Mahendran, Balu Mahendra, K. Balachander, Priyadarshan, Priyadarshan, Priyadarshan, Priyadarshan, Priyaraja, Bala, Nag Nag, Shankar Nag, and R. Balki.

Ilaiyaraaja's first two non-film albums were experiments in the blending of Indian and Western classical music.

The first, How to Name It?

(1986) is dedicated to the Carnatic master Tygara and J. S. Bach. It features a mashup of the Carnatic form and ragas with Bach partitas, fugues, and Baroque musical textures. Nothing But Wind (1988), the second volume, was conducted by Hariprasad Chaurasia and a 50-piece orchestra, follows the argument that music is a "natural phenomenon similar to many forms of air currents."

He has created a series of Carnatic kritis that were recorded by electric mandolinist U. Srinivas for the album Ilayaraaja's Classics on the Mandolin (1994). Ilaiyaraaja has also produced albums of devotional/devotional songs. His Guru Ramana Geetam (2004) is a series of prayer songs influenced by Hindu mystic Ramana Maharshi and his Thiruvasakam: A crossover (2005) is an oratorio of ancient Tamil poems transcribed partially in English by American lyricist Stephen Schwartz and performed by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. The Music Messiah (2006), Ilaiyaraaja's most recent release, is a world music-oriented collection.

On his birthday, he revealed that his "Isai OTT" app would be available soon, but that it will have more than just his songs, like behind-the-scenes information about how each of his songs were created, produced, delivered, and collaborations with other musicians.

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